San Diego Classic Film Calendar

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Wonder Con 2015, the Master of Suspense, and Other Stuff

The weekend after the TCM Classic Film Festival was Wonder Con. In the category of, You Never Know What You Are Going to Find at a Comic Convention, this year at Wonder Con, I found Hitchcock. It started when I was wandering a section of the Exhibit Hall that was mostly celebrities. Now, these tend to not be big names or even names you would recognize. They tend to be people who starred in low budget Sci-Fi and Horror movies in the 70s and 80s or played aliens on one of the Star Trek series. These are not going to be people you would stop on the street. Sure, if you are a fan of their stuff, you'd pay twenty bucks for a signed photo. Me, I tend to be fairly ambivalent to this sort of thing, but as I was walking along I saw a color representation of this:

A little background, the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho runs 3 minutes and has about 50 cuts. There is just one shot (above) where you see the knife against bare skin. I've known for quite a while that it was not Janet Leigh's stomach there. They used a body double. Walking around that section at Wonder Con roughly 55 years after the film's release, I was standing in front of the girl in Hitchcock's shower, Marli Renfro (Janet Leigh's body double from the shower scene). I don't normally buy autographs but the connection to Psycho was just too cool to pass up. Refro is a former Playboy model/Bunny and appeared in a number of other men's magazines. Of course, I had to buy the picture and have her autograph it to me:

I tried to get her to get her to show me her stomach, but she kept saying that I didn't want to see it, and I kept saying that I did. And I really did. Doing the math, she's somewhere in her mid-70s. So sure, I might have regretted it afterwards, but I would have wanted to see it anyway. Yes, I'm a pig. I know that. I toyed with the idea of asking her again the last day of the show, but realized that pestering a senior citizen to show skin was kind of a dick move. I decided to just say goodbye and that it was nice meeting her. Oddly, there was also someone else at Wonder Con doing cosplay of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. I didn't see them, but I had multiple people tell me about it and did get a photo:

The Birds cosplay, thanks, Anastasia, for the photo

Beyond that, I also saw a guy cosplaying the man with no name.

Clint Eastwood, eat you heart out

That's three, count 'em, three people doing classic film cosplay. Not bad for a comic convention.Now, you may have noticed the cowboy hat in the picture above. I got that done at Comic-Con last year. Details here. The reason I bring it up is that I decided to do another one, that is all classic film related. I got it started at Wonder Con and hope to finish it up at Comic-Con this year. I only got three pieces done, but it's a start.

First piece was the TCM logo by Scott Koblish

TCM logo, up close, blue tape is to indicate where the hatband will go

Chuck Wojtkiewicz and King Kong (he also did the Comic-Con logo on the cowboy hat)